The Effects of Temporal Framing on New Product Evaluation: The Role of Uncertainty

Three experiments explore how presenting a product launch as occurring in the future versus the past affects the information used to evaluate the product. When a product is described as a future event, marketplace conditions and characteristics of the sponsoring company receive consideration, and both types of information influence evaluations. However, with a past launch, only sponsor information receives consideration and guides evaluations (experiments 1 and 2). This temporal frame effect is attenuated when certainty is primed, implying that the uncertainty associated with the future versus the past motivates more comprehensive use of available information in the future (experiment 3).